Wright Talks Paul, Justification, Luther, & Calvin

Ben Witherington has a series of interviews going with N. T. Wright. The most recent (the second) had some intriguing bits and pieces. I especially enjoy hearing scholars recall those influential works they read earlier in their career.

My own combination of K[aesemann]’s rejection of B[ultmann], and Caird’s exposition of the OT view, all coming together within a covenantal frame which K[aesemann] explicitly rejected and C[aird] never quite embraced, has been so exegetically fruitful – notably of course in Romans 3 and 9-10 – that I have seen no reason to change it.

And, in the context of saying that Protestantism has tended to view Paul’s gospel as somehow opposing the whole of Judaism, Wright reflects on evangelicalism in particular:

…in much evangelicalism, the Old Testament is reduced to a book of types and patterns, lessons we can scoop up and transplant to our own day. It has thousands of those, of course, and we can learn from them. But the much bigger thing is the single story from Abraham to Jesus – NOT a smooth development or a steady crescendo but a dark and stormy passage with the sudden shaft of gospel light coming ‘when the time had fully come’ (Gal 4.4). All this needs a lot of spelling out still, but I hope I have pointed the way . . .